I would write poems even if no else read them.
Margaret Hasse
Day After Daylight Savings
By Margaret Hasse
Blue numbers on my bedside clock
tell I forgot to change the hour.
This sets routines on haywire.
Like a domestic goat staked
to its circle of earth,
I don’t do well untethered.
I have no hunger for early dinner,
become confused by the sound
of children who seem out
too late for a school night.
They’ve found an extra helping
of daylight to romp on new grass
and can’t contain themselves,
strip off jackets, scatter
like a rag of ponies.
Whatever time says,
their joy insists
on springing forward.
Most years when we spring forward, it feels like spring is on the other side of that time jump. I awake with a shorter day but with a spring mindset and a spring anticipation. Not this year. I am mired in an atmospheric river of winter, it just keeps snowing. Minneapolis streets are so compressed by ever encroaching piles of snow that we are down to single lanes of traffic on side streets. If there is a spring waiting as we set our clocks forward, I sure hope it sticks its head out of its burrow soon, our hearts are spring sick and looking for the great white north to turn green. We maybe carnivores in feeding our bellies but our souls are vegetarian, we need green and living things to fulfill us. Nearly March 15 and not a muddy dog in sight. But give it two weeks. The polish of spring grainy snow on paws will turn into the grime of snow melt. Plenty of time for brown to become the theme on the way to green.
Maybe we should start a movement and just always set our clocks back? Decide to never spring forward, instead always relive an hour of our lives twice a year, collectively grab time and pull it back. I think that’s the grief of daylight savings time. We lose time constantly, Delta steals it with endless flight delays, colleagues put you through repetitive meetings, our world is constantly taking us away from what’s important. We suffer those loses because we must. But to have an hour stolen that just doesn’t exist one day a year, seems like a self inflicted psychological wound that we can do without. Let’s either protest by always moving back, or just doing away with this silliness forever. Copernicus would be proud. Let’s leave the heavens to heaven and live on earth beset by days of 24 hours in length, give or take a wobble of the axis.
Sonnet 12
By William Shakespeare
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
Fourteen Lines 